An actor achieves immortality through his face, a singer through his voice. An author is able to live eternally through his writing, but for some, the finished words are not enough.

The critical notions surrounding authorship have been contentious since the 1960s, when developments in literary theory upset accepted notions about art. Critics such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (two names sure to make any humanities graduate student cringe) dismantled the axiom that the author was the architect of a literary work’s interpretive possibilities. Barthes went so far as to declare “the death of the author,” urging scholars to seek out a text’s meaning in its language, rather than in the intentions of its author.

Despite Barthes’ obituary for the author, the cult of authorship persists. Publishers around the world are breathing fresh life into deceased famous authors by posthumously releasing their “lost” works. In 2009, new books by Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and in a delicious twist of irony, Roland Barthes, hit the shelves. On the slate for the next couple of years are posthumous works by Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, David Foster Wallace, and Roberto Bolaño. (Bolaño’s corpse is proving to be staggeringly prolific, with as many as four releases on the horizon.)

Meanwhile, J.D. Salinger’s recent death has sparked an enormous level of speculation over the wealth of writings he might have been hoarding. At the time of his death, the notoriously cagey author hadn’t published in over forty-five years. It’s long been reported that he wrote upwards of fifteen manuscripts during his self-imposed exile. Despite Salinger’s militant protection of his privacy and apparent desire not to see these writings in the public sphere, it seems all but inevitable that at least some of them will be snatched up and published in the years to come.

While the frenzy surrounding authorial necromancy is infectious, few of these publications live up to the hype. Take last November’s publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, which was heralded in some quarters as the literary event of the year. Before his death in 1977, Nabokov instructed that the unfinished novel was to be burned if he should die before it was completed. Going against his father’s instructions, Dmitri Nabokov chose instead to have it published. In his introduction to the book, the son explains that “despite its incompleteness…[the writing] was unprecedented in structure and style,” and as a result, he “could no longer even think of burning Laura.” He justifies his decision by reasoning, “[I do not think] that my father or my father’s shade would have opposed the release of Laura once Laura had survived the hum of time this long… Should I be damned or thanked?”

Dmitri soon got his answer. Despite the flashy packaging — the 138 index cards on which Vladimir composed the fragments are replicated and perforated for the reader’s punch-out pleasure — the book was a flop. Although critics recognized faint glimmers of the brilliance that defined such masterpieces as Lolita and Pale Fire, Laura was ultimately dismissed as uneven, disjointed, and muddled. Tellingly, the final card reads, “efface, expunge, delete, cut out, wipe out, obliterate.”

While readers and critics alike have condemned Dmitri Nabokov’s decision to disobey his father, this same community has been very forgiving of similar betrayals when the final product has been more to its liking. It has long been said that Virgil insisted that the unrevised manuscript of The Aeneid be burned upon his death; his trusted friend Varius chose to release it anyhow. Similarly, if Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s literary executor, had obeyed the writer’s instructions, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika never would have seen the light of day.

It’s difficult to dispute the opportunistic nature of posthumous publishing. Dave Rosenthal of The Baltimore Sun suggests that the practice is, at its worst, “grave-robbing, crass exploitation to make a few bucks,” with publishers, executors, and academics seizing the chance to capitalize on unseen works by established names. Readers, too, have an almost mystical fascination with the novelty of posthumous literature. It is a means to engage with the dead, or partake in a kind of literary time travel — it is the chance to experience new work by writers who might have died before you were born, and whose voices now appear to be echoing from the mystic beyond.

Unfortunately, it’s rare that a posthumous publication dazzles its audience. Sure, you might argue John Kennedy Toole and Roberto Bolaño are primarily known for their excellent posthumous novels (A Confederacy of Dunces and 2666, respectively), but neither of them were established authors until after their deaths. Generally, it seems that when famous authors make deathbed warnings not to publish something they’ve written, there’s a good reason.

Unfinished novels are also problematic — they are inevitably compared to other works that their authors had the chance to revise and polish. The work-in-progress is frequently edited and modified after an author’s death in order to make it a cohesive product. This is a doubly troublesome, as it both dilutes the original text into a heavily edited shadow of a novel, and simultaneously deprives readers of the immersive experience that exploring an unfinished project can provide. Drafts, notes, and manuscripts are fascinating pieces of ephemera, like journals or correspondence. But like the personal papers of an author, unfinished writings are literary artifacts, not literary works; they lack the finality and the intent that define a finished product. Left untouched, they are valuable glimpses into the author’s writing process, but as artifacts, they should remain untouched and unedited: in no way should they be touted as examples of the author’s artistry.

One example of a published work-in-progress gone awry was Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth, published in 1999, five years after the writer’s death. The only novel Ellison published during his lifetime was 1952’s sprawling masterpiece, Invisible Man, and he spent the next forty-odd years toiling at his next novel. At the time of his death, he left 2,000 pages of his manuscript; Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, determined to publish his friend’s work, whittled the stack into a 368-page novel. His effort was met with tepid reviews. Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times that Juneteenth “feels disappointingly provisional and incomplete,” and that Ellison’s executor had “effectively changed the book’s entire structure and modus operandi. Instead of the symphonic work Ellison envisioned, Callahan has given us a flawed linear novel, focused around one man’s emotional and political evolution.”

Now, eleven years after Juneteenth’s publication, Callahan is trying again. Last week, the scraps and versions of Ellison’s unfinished opus were published as an annotated, 1136-page work-in-progress entitled Three Days Before the Shooting… This release presents Ellison’s manuscript more or less the way he left it, offering the reader a non-traditional foray into the author’s mind. By contextualizing and accepting the text instead of attempting to finish it, Callahan is finally letting it live.

In the end, the controversy surrounding posthumous publication will endure as long as the publications themselves. Despite the hit-and-miss — mostly miss — nature of the practice, for every Original of Laura, there is a Confederacy of Dunces, a treasure that might have never been unearthed, and for that reason, life after death will continue for many authors who leave unfinished business.

But instead of pouncing on a work that will sell copies for its author’s reputation alone, publishers need to use discretion in terms of the strength of the work, independent of its byline. Continuing on our current path of fetishizing departed authors, we’ll soon see fancy editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s grocery lists, or leather-bound copies of Virginia Woolf’s to-do reminders. Needless, opportunistic posthumous publications such as those serve no one, least of all the author. In his Slate review of Laura, Aleksandar Hemon quotes Vladimir Nabokov as once having said, “In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the results count.” By their own shortcomings, the published results of the author’s last, embryonic manuscript proved him right.

(Images courtesy of Random House)

P.K. Page, an extraordinary poet, prose writer, and painter, one of our most individual talents, died yesterday at home in Victoria, B.C. It is a loss not only for the world of Canadian poetry, over which she loomed large in her unusual way, but for Canada itself.

While I had read poems of hers before, I first encountered the enormity of her contribution in Ottawa in 2003, when Prof. Zailig Pollock, now named Page’s literary executor, spoke to a conference I attended. Pollock’s presentation was about the possibilities of hypertext poetry, and he used his ongoing work on Page as an example. After that day, I began to seek her poems out, and my reading of her has been a universally satisfying experience. (For an artist with such a wide range, she was unbelievably consistent.) The Walrus was fortunate to publish her work a few times over the years, most recently in June 2008, when we featured her poem “Each Mortal Thing,” illustrated by a pair of P.K.’s wonderful drawings.

While her passing is a considerable loss, especially given how productive she was in old age, there is some good news. As Quill & Quire reported yesterday, Pollock will be working with Tim Inkster and his excellent Porcupine’s Quill Press to publish a ten-volume edition of Page’s complete works. Additionally, Pollock and Dalhousie professor Dean Irvine will be preparing a hypermedia archive of her work. Thanks to these efforts, she will live on.

Last June, P.K. published a poem called “Cullen in the Afterlife” in Poetry. On this day after her passing, quoting its closing lines seems to me a very good way of saying goodbye:

So he must start once more. He had begun
how many times? Faint glimmerings and dim
memories of pasts behind the past
recently lived — the animal pasts and vague
vegetable pasts — those climbing vines and fruits;
and mineral pasts (a slower pulse) the shine
of gold and silver and the gray of iron.
The “upward anguish.”
What a rush of wings
above him as he thought the phrase and knew
angels were overhead, and over them
a million suns and moons.

(Drawing by P.K. Page. Click here to read more of her poetry in The Walrus.)

Writing is freedom. The freedom to express ideas; the freedom to influence others; the freedom to explore all facets of humanity. Many authors have used this power to delve into one of our greatest unknowns: what life would be like as a member of the opposite gender. Through fiction, male and female writers get to convey what they perceive to be the feelings, emotions, and struggles of, respectively, the fairer and fouler sexes. With that in mind, let’s consider some prime examples of both genders’ attempts to inhabit the minds of the other.

The Hours­ by Michael Cunningham, 1998
Cunningham creates not one but three substantial female characters, each of them deeply effected by Virginia Woolf’s 1925 book Mrs. Dalloway. The Hours follows Ms. Woolf (a fictional portrayal of the author), Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughn as they grapple with mental illness, suicide, and sexual identity. Cunningham borrows not only Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing style, but also many themes from her life and the plot of Mrs. Dalloway. His Pulitzer Prize–winning novel (which was transformed into an Oscar-winning film) is celebrated for its realistic portrayal of how women confront major problems of human existence.

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, 1911
This novella has Wharton examining the social pressures at work on a Victorian husband who is vexed by a difficult choice: stay with his ailing shrew of a wife, or run off with their young, comely housemaid. Ethan longs to make a new life for himself with Mattie, but society imposes his obligation to honour his vows to Zeena. The male protagonist has often been called an analog for Wharton, who was experiencing a similar pressure — juggling a spouse and a lover — at the time of writing. The story ultimately ends in tragedy, as Ethan and Mattie are brutally injured in a sledding accident. Wharton’s marriage fared no better; she divorced in 1913 after suffering a nervous breakdown.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, 1993
Eugenides’ debut novel, told in flashback by a chorus of middle-aged, male narrators, is about five teenaged sisters who all kill themselves. There’s a line near the beginning, when a doctor bandages the youngest sister’s wrists after a failed suicide attempt, that speaks volumes about the pitfalls of writing the opposing gender:

“Chucking her under the chin, he said, ‘What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.’ And it was then Cecelia gave orally what was to be her only form of suicide note, and a useless one at that, because she was going to live: ‘Obviously, doctor,’ she said, ‘you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.’”

Obviously, neither was Eugenides. It’s Sofia Coppola, though, who arguably worked harder to identify with the opposite gender when she wrote and directed a film adaptation of the novel. Her script embraces the distinct, first-person plural (male) narration that had allowed Eugenides to stay out of the sisters’ heads.

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors by Roddy Doyle, 1996
The Booker Prize–winning master of modern Irish fiction takes a complex and multifaceted look at abusive relationships from the perspective of an alcoholic mother of four. The Woman Who Walked Into Doors examines how such partnerships don’t always fit the victim-victimizer paradigm. Paula Spencer is physically and emotionally abused by her husband Charlo, yet finds herself adoring and despising him at various points throughout the narrative. Doyle goes to great lengths to make Paula more than a simple victim. He takes a more ambiguous stance, vacillating between love and hate, action and inaction. (A 2006 sequel, Paula Spencer, picks up her story ten years after Charlo’s death.)

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969
Winner of the 1969 Nebula and 1970 Hugo awards, Le Guin’s science fiction classic is told not only from the perspective of the opposite gender, but enters the world of the virtually sexless natives of the planet Winter (a.k.a. “Gethen”). Genly Ai, a human male, is sent to Winter by the Ekumen (an intergalactic UN) to convince its inhabitants to join their interplanetary alliance. He is often confused by what he finds on Winter: the absence of gender; the lack of technological development; the nonexistence of war. On Winter, female characteristics are perceived as negative qualities, and Gethens are always referred to by masculine pronouns. Like the best sci-fi, The Left Hand of Darkness uses its fantastical settings, characters, and environment to delve into real-world issues (sexual politics, gender imbalances, etc.) In that light, Le Guin’s novel can be seen as a pioneering work in the field of feminist science fiction.

She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb, 1992
Lamb missed the major literary awards with his tale of a troubled young woman. But five years after it was first published, the novel won a far more lucrative prize, when it became an early selection to Oprah’s Book Club. She’s Come Undone tracks the life of Dolores Price from age four. Lamb details her sexually violent adolescence (she is raped at thirteen), joyless years as an obese student (she overeats for comfort), and equally tumultuous early adulthood (she endures an abortion, questions of sexual identity, and emotionally abusive relationships). Some readers have complained that the character’s problems are too exaggerated to generate any real sympathy for her (I’ve personally heard Dolores described as “fulfilling every negative female stereotype”); others, however, have identified with and embraced her sorrows.

Sarah by J.T. LeRoy, 2000
Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy is the pen name of Laura Albert, the Brooklyn-born writer who perpetrated the greatest literary hoax of the young twenty-first century. For years, Albert presented LeRoy as a transgendered, abused, former child prostitute and drug addict who took to writing as a therapeutic process. Many readers took J.T.’s fictions as semi-autobiographical. His/her first novel, Sarah, details the travails of twelve-year-old Cherry “Sarah” Vanilla, an aspiring lot lizard who is compelled into cross-dressing, prostitution, and shoplifting by his mother. LeRoy followed Sarah with three more novels, feature articles in major magazines, and an associate producer credit on Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant. Albert concealed LeRoy’s true identity by conducting interviews via phone and email; with the author’s consent, Savannah Knoop, the half sister of Albert’s partner, Geoffrey Knoop, appeared in public as him/her. In 2006, The New York Times and New York magazine revealed the lie, and Albert confessed all to the The Paris Review. The next year, she was convicted of fraud for signing legal documents (film contracts for Sarah) as a fictional character. It’s an open question whether the value of LeRoy’s observations has been voided by the truth of Albert’s identity.

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, 1985
Tyler’s tenth tome tells the story of travel writer Macon Leary. He is dispassionate and depressed, the author of a series of books for reluctant travelers. He knows where to eat Chef Boyardee pasta in Rome and whether there are Taco Bells in Mexico, should his readers ever suffer the misfortunate to visit such places. Macon’s life crumbles after his son is murdered outside of a fast food restaurant; his wife leaves him, and he devolves to become the imperfect bachelor, eating popcorn for breakfast and stomping his laundry clean in the shower. After an injury forces him to move back to his family home, which he shares with his two brothers (also divorced) and their spinster sister, what follows is a quirky comedy set against the backdrop of tragedy. With the help of his dog trainer cum girlfriend Muriel, Macon eventually learns to take charge of himself.

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, 2007
Hill’s sprawling novel (published as Someone Knows My Name in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand) takes its title from a list of 3,000 African-American slaves who fought for the British during the American Revolutionary War, and were then offered free passage to Nova Scotia in return. It is told through the life of Aminata Diallo — a character drawn in three dimensions, as fully realized a protagonist as there has been in Canadian fiction. In a 2009 interview with the CBC’s George Stromboulopoulos, Hill called his novel primarily “a woman’s story.” The author confessed that he found the process of writing from a female point of view “scary,” and joked that he was able to get into the voice “through a whole bunch of cross dressing.” In fact, he imagined Aminata as his child, and gave her the ability to love “even when she’s drawn through hell.” The Book of Negroes was met with near-universal acclaim, and Hill concluded that the process of writing it gave him a better understanding not only of the world, but also of his own daughter.

Recently, I went to Random House’s Toronto offices to interview Michael Turner about his latest fiction, a study of war and migration called 8×10. The book is made up of a series of short sections, guided by a grid pattern that prefaces each. The title, in the author’s own words, “is derived from a commercial portrait format (the 8×10 glossy) and is related to the structural layout of the book: the lives of eight people — and the lives they come in contact with — told over ten events, each.”

There is a detail about this discussion that should be revealed up front ⎯ I have had a fangirl crush on Turner (Company Town, Hard Core Logo) since he released The Pornographer’s Poem close to a decade ago. This was a fact that I desperately (and poorly) tried to conceal when I was invited to do the interview. In addition to this obvious source of anxiety, Turner did not remove his (rather handsome) overcoat the entire time we spent together on a (rather handsome) leather couch. People leaving their coats on indoors is one of those things that makes me neurotically uncomfortable. My resulting inner monologue was, well,  neurotically uncomfortable. Thankfully, Turner seemed unaware.

At the end of an epic one-hour-and-forty-five minute discussion that covered everything from pro-sex feminism to the tyranny of yoga mat–pushing–big box bookstores, he was generous enough to say that I seemed like a confident, competent, and strong woman. And that I should get more physical exercise to deal with my stress. Honestly? I don’t think the interview did much to curb my crush.

Some people have referred to 8×10 as a puzzle. Do you feel when you’re writing that you’re putting together a puzzle? Are you a collector of sorts?

Composition and form — the form carries a kind of content. The book is a three-dimensional object, it’s suggestive of a certain kind of activity; you prepare yourself when you look at it. You look at a poem and you prepare yourself to fill in things.

I’m interested in how everyone’s touting the book as “experimental.”

Every book is experimental.

Well, it’s interesting to me because I actually found the book really accessible.

Well, thank you. Part of [the reason for] me not using names, places, races, and dates was to create that accessibility.

It’s almost as if the reader is in every piece of the story, because they’re not so distracted by detail. The readability is unbelievable. Were you deliberately against using specific names to create that feeling?

Names stop thought. Once you have a name for something, you can only think in a certain direction. There’s something to be said for holding back on the name. In The Pornographer’s Poem, the narrator was nameless, and to give him a name — what if I had called him Vito?

Names mean different things to different people; they change the whole tone of things. Vito, obviously —

When I say stops thought, I mean it stops abstract thinking, and it’s all about figuration. I want things open. The book is about things that are absent. If you were to go through it and find the squares [on the grid] that are blacked out, you’d find a prize. And no one’s done it.

It’s like an Easter egg.

No one’s done it! And for it to be done would be interesting, because the figure that emerges is the absent signifier. It is the thing that turns the book in a certain sense.

That’s a gem of knowledge to have.

It’s called 8×10. You expect eighty stories, but really there’s only sixty-four. It’s like people want their money back. It sounds disingenuous to say that what the book lacks is that which is not there, but I do think there is something to that. It’s like the white space around a poem, or the Ian Wallace tableau where he had a photo imprinted on a canvas with two monochromatic paint panels…If you’ve read The Pornographer’s Poem you remember the Bullshit Detector: it’s about where you’re coming from, where you’re going, what did you do to get there, and what will you do to get from there. It’s always about the back story.

The stereotypical Canadian narrative is always laid out for us, telling us the feelings we should have. At the end of every piece in 8×10, we’re left with our own feelings as a reader — it’s like you don’t give us enough to give us more. It’s a very generous thing for a writer to do, to trust readers enough to take something unique from the work. That sounds lofty, but it’s an honest reaction to this notion that you’re not going to give it all to us so we can figure it out for ourselves.

Yeah, you can either go with it, or you can be happy with an instance of pattern and recurrence. The portraiture is based on a pattern of behaviours as opposed to a visage, the face.

Do you feel that some readers will look at 8×10 as an experiment or something mathematical, whereas others will perceive it as telling all of our stories? A lot of reviews of the book have been very technical in terms of breaking down its structure, but I tend to be more of a romantic. Did you deliberately write it that way, to allow such varied approaches?

Well, everything I do is deliberate. But there are things that happen serendipitously. Or apart from my knowledge. Or at the expense of my knowledge. Like I said earlier, I’m interested in form, and like Beckett says, “form carries content.”…The toy, the prize in the book, is in the middle of the book, and it’s the middle of the title. The book is an attempt to reorient people but it’s really hard to do, because the narratives are in us. We’re born and we’re raised with them. The master narratives have atomized now. But grand theory and politics and party politics, it’s all breaking up, right? More than ever, I think people need to cling to those old ideas for comfort, so they’re always going to bring those narratives to something new until they can accept a work on its terms. They can go, “I’m having a feeling here. I’m having the feeling that maybe I’m supposed to have.” It’s a sensation, as opposed to something being over and done with. The modern novel is all about ending with suspension. It’s not about ending with —

Closure.

Closure. You know, therapy is destroying literature. It insists on closure. “I need closure! That man has to have his head cut off in order for me to feel better about my son or daughter being killed. Or that man has to have lethal injection in order for me to feel better. And I have to be there to see it.” We live in a violent, militaristic, vengeful world culture. It’s not just war, it’s pestilence. So if it’s not Afghanistan or Iraq, it’s SARS or H1N1. We’re kept in a state of fear. I’m trying to reflect the times somewhat. To comment on the times. Hence the beheadings.

I’ve always been intrigued by how you write about sexuality. There’s a simultaneous repulsion-attraction thing going on. It’s very arousing, but it’s not the stereotypical “this is a sexy scene.” There’s this filth aspect to the way you write about sex that doesn’t necessarily make it ugly, but it’s definitely not what we think of when we think of sexy.

Theories of desire are all based on attraction-repulsion: we are attracted to that which we are repulsed by. That dialectic. I do believe that pornography operates as a burlesque in the mainstream. There is no mainstream anymore. [Porn] is at times repulsive and repetitive, but it does mirror other things. It mirrors production. It mirrors social relations.

I actually think it’s a style of writing that appeals to women. From a feminist perspective, it’s so much more honest. It’s a more realistic portrayal of the way sex actually happens, instead of a floral or degrading way of presenting it. Your approach sits nicely in the middle: it’s honest, at times gross, but it’s beautiful. I don’t see a lot of literature that’s written that way. Is there anything you’ve read that you can appreciate on that level?

Well. About a year and a half ago I was invited to the Witte de With [Center for Contemporary Art] in Rotterdam to take part in a show called Bodypoliticx, which was about representations of sexuality. They asked me to have a live public discussion with Xaviera Hollander.

Wow.

And I was like, “Yes.” So I went and read The Happy Hooker, which I’d never read, but I’d read Xaviera!, the sequel, because my mom had it. I can’t open an old paperback now without being reminded of that book. The smell that comes off the old paperback — I mean, I feel it, down here. [Xaviera!] was a book that I would go to late at night. I liked the way that she wrote about sex the way she wrote about shopping, about running a business, about a travel schedule. It was all even. It’s that Dutch matter-of-factness. So I read The Happy Hooker, and after finishing it I thought, this would never be published now. She has sex with a boy. She has sex with a dog. She does S&M…It is a repulsive, repugnant book, but at the same time it is not. She is so honest. She is a very intelligent woman and she lets you know that. You could tell she loves sex, but she loves life, she loves everything she does.

Do you think there’s a sanitizing of our culture now that makes that attitude just not possible? You said a book like that would never be published today.

Well, it would be illegal to publish it. And immoral as well.

You’ve worked in a variety of different media over your life. Is there any experience you enjoyed more than others? Do you think of yourself as a writer? Do you think of yourself as a musician?

As a musician, I was writing songs. It’s always been about writing. It always begins with writing. Breaking it down by genre — “Michael Turner is a novelist”? I hate that. Just writer is fine by me.

Is there something that you haven’t done that you’d really like to do?

[Silence.]

Not like horseback riding, or something.

I’ve ridden on horses. [Pause.] No.

No? You’ve done it all?

No, I’m not saying that. I’m not saying I’ve done it all. I think my nature is a little more existential. I just go through life and get surprised.

You’re not very ambitious?

No. If I want to do something I’ll make a point of doing it, but that’s the point. If you ask me, “Do you want to go for lunch?” I’ll tell you, “Sure, let’s go here.” I’m not the kind of person who says, “I don’t know, where do you want to go?” I’ll have an idea. Okay. Okay. The first thing that comes to mind is just travel. Certain places I haven’t been to. I have to go to Shanghai because my father was born there; I’d like to go to South Africa one day. I’ve been everywhere else. But what would I like to do as a writer?

As a writer, yes.

I would probably like to have the kind of time I think I need in order to write poetry.

I read that you’re less interested in the prose novel now.

I’ve never been interested in the novel. I’ve always been at odds with the novel. I can and I can’t understand why it persists. Whatever. I try not to refer to my work by genre. I think Pornographer’s Poem is [considered] a novel only because there was confusion because it was called a poem. 8×10 has been reviewed as a novel, but nowhere on there does it say novel. I made sure of that. We’re calling it fiction. “But they’ll think it’s short stories.” No they won’t! It’s a fiction. I’m a writer, not an author.

What is validating for you?

My favourite thing is when my work is taught.  If my work is added to a course and it’s discussed and I’m asked to come in, I’ll be there in a second. All I ever want to be is engaged in a conversation, and if my books are part of a conversation, that’s great. So when I’m writing, I’m writing my conversations with the literature. All of it. Whatever’s been written…I read what you read. I know what you read. I can tell what you read. And I can tell you about it on its terms. My arrogance is such that I can tell you why I think you like it. Bear in mind that what I do is based in some ways on what you read. And how your narratives are formed. Or reinforced.

All right.

One more thing!

Absolutely!

Just to go back to the Xaviera Hollander, Happy Hooker, Pornographer’s Poem: I will say that the narrator of The Pornographer’s Poem was a repressed kid, and I think that’s reflected through certain aspects of the writing. But Xavier Hollander was a literary woman in a time — in the early sixties, when she started to write the book — she was always a liberated woman. Her achievement to me is as significant as what Angela Davis did, or what Gloria Steinem did, or what Betty Friedan did, or Germaine Greer. She’s a pro-sex feminist, despite herself. Actually, what she is is a libertarian, and certainly a libertine, but really she’s a very conservative woman. Much like the most repulsive pornography she does create an effect, through her being in the world.

(Portrait by Judy Radul)

“He whose desire turns away from outer things, reaches the place of the soul. If he does not find the soul, the horror of emptiness will overcome him, and fear will drive him with a whip lashing time and again in a desperate endeavor and a blind desire for the hollow things in the world.”
— From the first chapter of Carl Jung’s The Red Book

I am sitting in an office sparsely adorned with Aboriginal artwork, facing a middle-aged, white-haired gentleman: well-dressed, cross-legged, with a slight, soothing English accent. Here, I feel likely to spill about my neuroses, fears, and dreams. Instead, I discuss Carl Jung’s The Red Book with Robert Gardner, Jungian analyst and president of the C.G. Jung Foundation of Ontario.

The Red Book is the germination of Jung’s avant-garde theories about the unconscious, the basis for the famed Jungian method. The manuscript, a product of sixteen years of work, is replete with the Swiss psychiatrist’s own images from dreams and mythologies, alongside his interpretations of and reflections on such matters. Jung wrote and illustrated it between 1914 and 1930, but it is only now accessible to the public. The Red Book is on display at The Rubin Museum of Art in New York City until January 25. It’s also available in print, though mostly back ordered due to unforeseen popularity: only 5,000 copies were printed for its first edition (which retails for $153 on amazon.ca), a publishing miscalculation that anticipated slim readership in a recessionary market.

Carl Jung spent many years collaborating with Sigmund Freud before their paths diverged. Both are known for significant contributions to the field of analytical psychology and for their influence on the arts, humanities, films, and popular culture. They popularized the notion that one’s inner life merits examination, but it was Jung who turned psychotherapy away from the treatment of the sick to a focus on individuality. He is best known for his theories on the psyche and descriptions of universal, primordial images, known as archetypes of the collective unconscious. Jung was fascinated by how civilizations sealed off from one another share symbols and mythologies, and concluded that in order to change collective perspective we need to understand the soul of the individual. His insights on personality types are integrated today in the Myers-Briggs personality test, which classifies people within four dichotomies, notably extroversion versus introversion.

After separating from Freud and in the lead up to World War I, Jung faced a period of great depression and introspection. What emerged is considered the most influential unpublished work in the history of modern psychology — a beautiful, illustrated personal diary that documented his dreams and fantasies. The Red Book is colourful and intricate, with paintings of mandalas, reptiles, serpents, and Greek deities. It is undeniably important from a historical perspective, showing the preliminary ideas and concepts of one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. Yet for many years it remained locked in the Jung family home, and in a bank vault in Zurich. Carl Jung left no specific instructions regarding what to do about the manuscript when he passed in 1961. His family, respecting his uncertainty and fear of disrepute among his science-oriented colleagues, kept it mum for decades.

The tug of war for control of The Red Book pitted Jung’s descendents against Stephen Martin and Sonu Shamdasani, co-founders of the Philemon Foundation, which dedicates itself to preparing Jung’s unpublished works for wide release. The family finally conceded in 1997, after the passing of Jung’s son Franz, who had vehemently opposed the intrusion into his father’s personal life, and the publication of two critical books about Jung (Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung and The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement) by prominent U.S. psychologist Richard Noll. From that point, it took another dozen years for The Red Book to reach retail shelves.

Searching for The Red Book at a Toronto Indigo store this weekend, however, elicited blank stares and the following response from a sales associate: “No, we don’t have it. Has he written anything else?” I was tempted to reply with a quote from the text — “The spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul” — but decided to move on.

When I turned to the Jungian community to decipher the significance of this work, I found a divided group and a publication engulfed in controversy. “The disquiet of it, and my own reluctance of getting into it, is that it’s a man’s story of his life when he was struggling and disoriented. It’s very personal. I feel [the publication is] a bit voyeuristic,” says Gardner. But I suspect there is something more to it than that: Jungians fret about the misunderstanding of their teacher’s theories — and, by extension, their profession as well. They maintain that The Red Book alone cannot produce an understanding of Jung’s work, which instead requires devoted academic study of his ideas about religion, mythology, folklore, and psychopathology. It all seems rather esoteric, but Gardner assures me that Jungian therapy and analysis is very practical and relevant today — the goal being to rediscover oneself, who one was meant to be from the beginning. “By connecting with deeper imagery, one is also connected to the deeper level of our being, but also the deeper levels of our culture of humanity,” he says. “In doing so, one becomes much less alienated, which to me, is really the biggest problem of the day.”

Another concern put forward by the Jungian community is that Jung’s critics may use The Red Book as proof that he was psychotic — and his work, therefore, the ravings of a lunatic. On its own, the book certainly lends itself to misinterpretation for being overwhelming and seemingly new age. The Rubin Museum, however, has provided a strong context, distilling the breadth of its contents into a few prevalent themes. In Canada, in the hands of Penguin Group (published by W.W. Norton & Company), nothing has been done to bolster the launch: there is neither context nor publicity for The Red Book’s release. (At this time, Penguin Group has not responded to questions about its sales and promotion strategy for The Red Book.)

Today, the field of psychology is moving toward a science orientation with brain imagery and controlled experimentation. Personality psychology and social psychology are still taught at top institutions like McGill University, but are falling in favour. In that way The Red Book appears to have missed its moment of peak relevance by several decades. Yet, whether we choose to admit it or not, the quest for one’s soul is everlasting and ubiquitous. Here is a book about humanity’s personal journey, brimming with lessons and insight about our collective unconscious. But few people, it seems, have clued into this. Perhaps this is because the book has been under-promoted, or its price is too expensive, or its ideas are too challenging to decipher. Fortunately, the answer to that question won’t take decades to reveal itself: in several weeks, 10,000 copies of The Red Book’s second edition will become available to the public. After this much time, the extra wait seems well worth enduring.

Few writers can lay claim to the triple crown — the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize — of CanLit award nominations. M.G. Vassanji pulled it off two years ago with The Assassin’s Song, and Rawi Hage followed suit with last year’s Cockroach. This year, Vancouver writer Annabel Lyon joined their illustrious ranks with The Golden Mean, her first novel for adults. Depicting Aristotle’s tutelage of a young Alexander the Great, The Golden Mean is a gripping, thoughtful dramatization of one of the most intriguing relationships in ancient history. Tonight, Lyon joins the other four writers shortlisted for the Giller in Toronto for the award ceremony. I spoke with her over champagne during the International Festival of Authors.

Before we talk about The Golden Mean, can you tell me about the experience of being nominated for all these awards?

I feel like I’ve been hit by something large. It’s overwhelming, and the days have become very long. It’s a lot of media and it’s a lot of readings. I’m used to being at home in my room and my book being this little personal thing, and all of the sudden it’s just out there. Of course, I’m not complaining at all. It’s wonderful, but it is very overwhelming, and I’m a pretty shy person.

How did the experience of writing a novel compare to writing the shorter fiction you’ve published?

It was really hard. I feel like I’m a short story writer. I always compare it to running: it all depends on what you’ve got the body for, and what you’re wired for. You might be a short-distance runner, or you might be a long-distance runner. I think I’m a short-distance writer. I feel confident when I do that, in control. The novel was a long, hard slog, and it didn’t come naturally at all. There were many points where I thought, “Can I just make this back into a short story?” I wanted to give up. But the story was just too big; it needed the scope of a novel.

Do you plan to write more novels in the future?

I have an idea for a sequel to this one. It was always a two-book project in my mind. I would love to write more short stories and I plan to, but it’s not like I have all these great novel ideas racked up and waiting to go in a production line. It would have to be something pretty compelling to get me to dive back into that again. Did I mention it was hard?

Why write a novel about Aristotle today?

I was a philosophy major as an undergrad. I liked ancient philosophy and ethics, and he’s the towering figure when you put those two together. I always loved to read his work, which I realize is incredibly geeky, which I am. In times of stress I would read Nicomachean Ethics, because it calmed me down. It’s someone trying to think things through in a very steady, calm, orderly way. To give you a trivial example: I would come home from going on a date which was kind of miserable, and I’d feel gross and wasn’t ready for bed right away, and I would start reading Aristotle. No wonder I didn’t get more dates. The period after September 11, not quite so trivially, was a stressful time. I started thinking, as did many people in the arts, “What’s the relevance of what I’m doing? Who needs fiction right now? What am I doing after all?” I started reading Aristotle again, and I was struck by how relevant and how contemporary he is. He’s asking questions like, “What is it to live a good life? What is it to be a good citizen? How do you avoid extremism?” All of which is hugely relevant. I remember reading that tiny little bio that was in the front of [his books] and thinking how I would make that into a novel. I’m a fiction writer, and eventually the fiction brain comes back. It took a long time before I realized I was actually going to write the novel, because I was just doing it as an exercise to see how I would write the novel if I was going to do it. [Finally] I accepted that I was really working on it.

Are there particular lessons you think Aristotle has for us today?

That idea of the golden mean, the avoidance of extremes and trying to find a middle ground. I think that is relevant, for obvious reasons in the world today, and something that will remain relevant, at the personal level and the political level, as long as there are human beings. My bigger project was that I really wanted people to know who Aristotle was and remember what he gave to the culture, because he’s at the foundation of so many things. He was one of the first empirical scientists. He went out and got his hands dirty, where the Greek philosophers before him just sat in chairs and thought things through. He was the father of logic, which led all the way to computer science and gave us the world we have today. He was one of the first people to do dissection on animals, which gave us modern medicine. Then there’s his ethics. And not just western culture, he was a huge influence over medieval Islamic scholars, as well. He’s like a Leonardo DaVinci or a Shakespeare — one of those once-in-a-thousand-years brains. I have little kids and I realized they can go through twelve years of school, they can go to university, they can get PhDs, and never have to learn anything about Aristotle. That felt wrong to me. I just want people to realize that deep down under everything the world is today, he’s there. It’s all built on top of what he did.

How close is your portrayal of Aristotle to what we know about the actual person?

There are works of historical fiction that play a lot more with characters and invent scenes that never really happened. That can be wonderful and really fun to read, but since my goal was to kind of give Aristotle back, I didn’t want to give him back in a warped or twisted way. I wanted to keep it pretty straightforward. Obviously, there’s not a lot that’s known because he lived 2,300 years ago, so I had to extrapolate a lot from his writings. For instance, it’s known that his father was a physician, so I assumed that he would have learned some of his father’s trade. I don’t know that for sure, but it’s a pretty safe assumption.

Can you talk a bit about your decision to portray him as essentially bipolar?

Again, that’s extrapolation from his work. He wrote in a book called Problems about the link between what he called melancholy — but we would call depression — and the creative temperament. It sounds like something he knew intimately and wrote about from experience. Then you look at the sheer amount of work that he produced. It’s a manic mind that could never switch off. He was just insanely curious about everything. Metaphysics, law, politics, theatre, marine biology, astronomy, astrology, the Olympics — you name it and he wrote a book about it. So at the other end there was this kind of frenetic mind that just never seemed to stop. You take those two things and then look in the Ethics where he writes about the golden mean being his ideal. I thought, that doesn’t sound like somebody who’s arrived at that, it sounds like someone who desperately wants that.

What is it about this particular period in Aristotle’s life — when he began tutoring Alexander the Great — that attracted you to write about it?

Those seven years were the most tumultuous of his life. He spent the first twenty years of his adult life in Plato’s Academy as basically a student and then as a teacher. And then he had this period of travels where, after Plato died, he went to Asia Minor, he went to Turkey, and then he lived on the island of Lesbos before being summoned back to his birthplace, Macedonia. He spent seven years there, and during that period Macedonia conquered the rest of the southern city-states. He was away from Athens, which is the center of the world for an intellect like him. Then he tutored the young Alexander, who must have been a force to be reckoned with. After Philip, the king of Macedonia, died, Alexander took the throne and went off on his big campaigns. Aristotle went back to Athens and stayed there for pretty much the rest of his life. Once again he was in a university writing books. Externally and internally, I thought that seven-year period really had the most going on, and it’s also a nice, discreet period for a novelist. It has a beginning, and a middle, and an end. For me, coming to it from short stories, I needed that framework to hang it on.

What was the research process like?

I wrote a very embryonic, complete first draft of about forty pages before I did much research at all, and then went out and did a lot of reading. I came back and realized I’d gotten all this stuff wrong, so I went back and fixed it. It got longer: it was eighty pages, then a hundred pages. I went out and did more research, and then I came back to writing again. The neat thing about something set in ancient times is that there’s a limit to how many primary sources you can read. You can get to the end of it, whereas if you’re writing about Shakespeare you can go on researching forever. So in a way, [The Golden Mean] being set so long ago made the research a little easier. But I didn’t go to Greece. I was having babies at the time that I was writing this and I couldn’t get away from them. More to the point, you can’t go to ancient Greece. Things that I would have wanted to see just weren’t there anymore.

Did working on the novel so long change your relationship to Aristotle’s work?

The more I worked on him, the more he became a frail figure in my mind. He starts out seeming like this monolithic, huge brain. Such a reputation, such influence down the ages; you think he must have been this solid, confident figure. Yet the more I read his work and the more I thought about the character, the less true that seemed. He increasingly became someone who I felt worried for.

Throughout the novel, characters use contemporary vernacular, including profanity. What went into your decision to take that route?

When I started working on it, I found that I was using a very British diction, which was really annoying, because that’s not my diction. My dad’s English, so I sort of have that voice in my head. A lot of historical fiction, especially about the ancient world, is written by Brits. It’s become a convention to have characters speak British diction. I started questioning why I was doing this, and why I couldn’t just use a North American diction. I ended up having the Athenians speak like Brits, because the Athenians are from of an older, more refined culture; they certainly looked down on the Macedonians for being a very young, very wealthy, barbarous society that had to import all its culture. I gave the Macedonians my vernacular, the North American ways of speech. I’ve had reviewers trip on that sometimes and say, “Well, why do they speak this, it sounds anachronistic, it sounds too contemporary, would they really swear like that?” Well, why would they say “bloody hell” like a British person? That doesn’t make any more sense. [Using contemporary vernacular] also seemed a way of saying this isn’t British history that I’m writing, this is Canadian history. We’re a democracy, and where does that come from? We watch Hollywood movies that are in three acts, and who wrote about that first? This is Canadian history, it’s North American history, it’s world history — so why can’t I use my own voice?

Since this is your first novel for adults, I wonder what differences you noticed between writing for adults and children, both in the composition and the reception.

I’ve found children’s writing easier. It’s a more joyous thing to do. I look forward to sitting down at the desk, and it comes very easily. Obviously there are certain things you wouldn’t write about in a children’s book, and the level of language has to be different. I had to learn to do that, and I had a great editor who helped me through it. The Golden Mean was definitely harder, darker. As far as reception goes, I think the real contrast is with publishing short fiction. People often think The Golden Mean is my first book, when I’ve written prior collections. Short fiction really doesn’t count. I’ve spoken to poets about this, and they’re also often asked, “Are you just a poet?” In the same way: “Are you just a short story writer?” It still amazes me that people are buying this book. As a short story writer, I’m used to selling my 400 copies. You sit at the tables waiting to sign, and you watch everybody line up for the novelists. Now people are lining up for me, and I still have that kind of feeling: “Really, you bought that? You bought my book?” I have no experience with this. This is crazy.

(Photo by Phillip Chin)

Lisa Moore is picking at old wounds. Her latest novel, February, is about the Ocean Ranger — an oil rig whose sinking off the coast of Newfoundland in February 1982 remains a painful blight on the province’s collective memory. February follows the lives of the fictional Helen O’Mara — whose husband is among the eighty-four men killed in a disaster that yielded no survivors — and her four children. Moore explores how loss is played out over nearly thirty years of slip-and-slide between past and present. With February, the author delivers what readers of her two previous collections of short stories and one novel have come to expect of her work: prose that is at once challenging and facile, richly poetic but eminently consumable.

When February came out, one critic accused it of being too Canadian. We’re at a point where “Canadian” is sometimes used as shorthand for literature that is too aesthetic or intellectual.  What are your thoughts on where such “Canadian-ness” fits into our national literature?

I’m from Newfoundland, and that probably comes before being Canadian, or at least gets mixed up in it: they’re two separate identities mixing together. Since becoming a writer, I’ve travelled through Canada a lot to do readings, and that has really informed my idea of what it means to be Canadian — just travelling in the landscape and seeing how different it is and meeting the people. I really don’t believe there is such a thing as a Canadian kind of writing. I think that Canadian literature is as diverse as the country is big, and it gets more and more diverse every day. I read last night with three other writers, and each of the books that we read from was completely different. Of the three books written by Canadians, one is set in Beirut, one is love poetry, and mine is about the sinking of the Ocean Ranger. That’s a literary experience in Canada: if you go to a reading, you hear all of that.

Do Canadian authors tend more toward regionalism, then? Does writing from Newfoundland have a distinct voice?

Newfoundland is difficult to get to, and it has in the past been difficult to make a living there. Mostly people were dependent on fish. Now, of course, the fishery is gone, and we’re reaping the benefits of oil.  Michael Crummey’s [recent book Galore] is about outport living, and my book is about an oil rig that sank. Both involve isolation. An oil rig is an island, too, in a way. So that’s something that we share in common: the literature is informed by geography.

You and Michael Crummey are both belong to the writer’s group The Burning Rock Collective. It seems that in Newfoundland, and St. John’s in particular, the artistic community is tightly knit.  How much does the conversation taking place in that community influence your work?

Michael Winter is a very good friend of mine, and Ramona Dearing, Larry Mathews, Claire Wilkshire, Beth Ryan: these are all people whose work I’ve read and commented on while it was in progress, and they’ve read mine and offered me criticism. That experience makes literature a really living thing. It gives it another layer; it lifts it off the page. St. John’s is also a diverse place artistically. The music scene is very rich, there’s a great visual arts scene, and film is taking off. Everybody knows each other, and everyone is often collaborating.

In February, we get a strong sense of community. The Ocean Ranger sinks, and there’s this experience of communal grief that happens afterward.

When the Ocean Ranger sank in Newfoundland, it was a tremendous shock that just reverberated through the whole province. That disaster is still a raw wound there.

Why do you think that is?

It’s because it never should have happened. Corners were cut, and safety procedures weren’t followed. The men weren’t trained properly; they didn’t have enough survival suits. The lifeboats were not durable; many of them broke apart when they got in the water. Loss of the sort that occurred on the Ocean Ranger is always shocking and difficult to take, but even more so when it’s unnecessary.

It broke my heart to read the Royal Commission on the Ocean Ranger disaster.  I just found it unbearably sad. It outlines the details of all the things that went wrong, many of which could have been avoided. It made me realize that people risk their lives just to make a living on a regular basis.

Do you have any personal connection to the Ocean Ranger disaster?

No, but my own father died very suddenly of natural causes around the same time. My mother and father were madly in love, and I watched my mother go through that grief. My sister and I went thought it as well.

I thought a lot about the idea of trauma when I read February and the idea — I think Hannah Arendt said this, among other people — that it can be worked through with narrative. Was writing February a kind of catharsis?

When I went to research the book there was very little material information available. There was almost nothing written: just the Royal Commission and a few books and documentaries. It was astonishing how little material there was about an event that had left such a mark on Newfoundland.  Then this year another book came out at the same time as my own — a piece of non-fiction by Mike Heffernan called Rig — and a sociologist named Susan Dodd is writing a book about the Ocean Ranger as well. It feels to me like people have come to a point in the process of grieving or working through trauma where it’s becoming possible to tell the story. And also absolutely necessary to tell the story.

I wanted to show that this is not the kind of disaster that just hits the headlines and then goes away. This is the kind of thing that continues to affect people who are left behind for generations. It wasn’t just the loss of those men, as awful as that was, it was also that their families were scarred. In fact, the whole province was. It was important to me to say that with the book.

Despite that, the ending of February is very hopeful.

When someone dies, in order to honour that life you have to live joyfully. Even though the book is about grief in some ways, I wanted there to be joy in it as well. I wanted that to come through in the language, in the way that Helen experiences through her senses. I hope that it’s a sensual book, that the senses of the reader are engaged and come alive. And I wanted Helen to fall in love again. Because I think that is not, in fact, a romantic notion but a realistic notion.

(Photo by Barbara Stoneham)

With such successes as The World According to Garp, A Prayer For Owen Meany, and The Cider House Rules to his name, John Irving is one of the most beloved novelists of our time. Last week he appeared at IFOA XXX to promote his twelfth novel, Last Night in Twisted River. (You can listen to the early part of the event via The Globe and Mail’s podcast.)

At first, Irving spoke about his writing process, which always begins with him figuring out the final sentence of his intended novel. Only then, he explained, can he know where to start. For two decades, Irving struggled to find the closing words of Twisted River. When he had them at last, he was able to craft the book with unprecedented speed. Irving started writing in 2005, and delivered the manuscript to his publisher just over a year ago — a furious pace by his standards.

Irving read the novel’s opening passages, then sat down with CTV host Seamus O’Regan for a fascinating discussion. O’Regan quoted a passage from Twisted River wherein the protagonist, a renowned writer named Daniel Baciagalupo, laments the propensity of readers to search his novels for evidence of autobiography. O’Regan likewise lamented that this put him in the awkward position of recognizing autobiographical elements in Twisted River, but feeling reluctant to explore them. Irving jokingly threw his interviewer a lifeline when he admitted that Kurt Vonnegut, in scenes from the book, repeats the same advice to Danny at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop that he once gave Irving, in reality, at the same institution.

During the audience Q&A session that followed, a high school English teacher asked Irving how he feels about his work being taught in schools. The author confessed to mixed feelings. Many of his favourite books are those that he first read in school, he said, and so he likes that students will be exposed to his work. But there were other books (e.g. Faulkner canon), he continued, that he was made to read when he wasn’t ready for them, and so he hates the idea of students being forced to slog through his novels if they don’t enjoy them. “Teach the books,” Irving instructed his questioner, “but make sure your students know I’m not the one forcing them to read them.”

Later, Irving related an amusing anecdote about Charlton Heston’s arrival at a Planned Parenthood benefit screening of The Cider House Rules, the 1999 film based on his abortion-themed novel. No one would sit with Heston, fearing he was a right-wing zealot, but the writer knew better. “The Planned Parenthood people assumed that because he was a big gun-rights guy, he must be pro-life — when actually, and I’ll bet you didn’t know this, he was as staunchly pro-choice as he was pro-gun. His entire political philosophy was, ‘Don’t you tell me what to do!’”

All in all, a very enjoyable evening with one of America’s most celebrated storytellers.